1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a head suspension for supporting a slider in a disk drive such as an external storage device of a computer, a load beam which is a part of the head suspension, and a method of manufacturing the load beam.
2. Description of Related Art
Disk drives such as magnetic disk drives and optical disk drives are widely used as external storage devices of computers. Among the disk drives, a magnetic disk drive or a hard disk drive (HDD) has a head suspension for supporting a magnetic head slider (hereinafter simply referred to as “slider”).
The head suspension includes a base plate, a load beam, a flexure attached to the load beam, and the like. The load beam supports a gimbal which is a plate spring. A front end of the gimbal forms a tongue serving as a slider mount. To the tongue, the slider is attached with, for example, an adhesive. The slider is slightly pushed with spring force toward the surface of a magnetic disk arranged in the magnetic disk drive.
The periphery of the tongue at the front end of the gimbal is mostly cut from the body of the gimbal. The slider on the tongue is supported with a dimple formed at a front end of the load beam. The dimple has a convex curved surface to support the back side of the slider. A barycenter of the slider adhered to the tongue is aligned on the dimple.
When the magnetic disk is rotated, a fluid dynamic pressure effect occurs to slightly float the slider from the surface of the magnetic disk against load applied to the slider by the load beam. At this time, the dimple functions as a fulcrum to freely change the attitude of the slider in tangential and normal directions relative to a track of the magnetic disk.
As mentioned above, the slider opposes the dimple with the tongue interposing between them. To properly control the attitude of the slider, it is very important to position the barycenter of the slider just on a vertex of the dimple.
From the front side of the tongue where the slider is mounted, the dimple is invisible because the dimple is arranged on the back side of the tongue. This positional relationship between the slider and the dimple prevents the precise positioning of the slider onto the dimple because the positions of the slider and dimple are not visually confirmable.
To solve this problem, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-86984 discloses a technique shown in FIG. 7. This related art is a magnetic head assembly for a magnetic disk drive, capable of accurately positioning a slider. In FIG. 7, the magnetic head assembly has a gimbal 101 at a front end of the assembly. The gimbal 101 has an opening 111. The opening 111 is formed in a tongue 109 of the gimbal 101 at a position corresponding to a barycenter of a slider 107 and a dimple 105 formed at a front end of a load beam 103. The opening 111 is closed with a sheet 113 that is optically transparent and is adhered to the tongue 109. Between the tongue 109 and the periphery of the slider 107, there is interposed an attitude correcting sheet 115 to keep the slider 107 parallel to the surface of the tongue 109. On the gimbal 101, a wiring pattern 117 is formed. The wiring pattern 117 is electrically connected to an electrode pad (not shown) of the slider 107 through a GBB 119 which is a kind of ultrasonic bonding.
According to this related art, the opening 111 and sheet 113 allow the dimple 105 arranged on the back side of the tongue 109 to be visible from the front side of the tongue 109. As a result, the slider 107 can precisely be positioned with respect to the dimple 105, to improve a data accessing ability of the magnetic head assembly.
The related art, however, involves a complicated structure.